The conclusion seems to be that girls are more verbal while boys are more mathematical, but no one is saying what the baseline is. Would Gauss's ring finger have been longer than his middle finger? What about Emily Dickinson's digits? What am I missing?

At age four, Garcia experienced the amputation of two-thirds of his right middle finger. While vacationing in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Garcia was given the chore of steadying wood while his elder brother chopped, when he inadvertently put his finger in the way of the falling axe. Garcia's father drove him, after his mother wrapped his hand in a towel, over thirty miles away to the nearest hospital. A few weeks later, Garcia, who immediately after the accident never looked at his finger, was surprised to discover that most of his finger was missing when the bandage he was wearing came off during a bath. Garcia later confided that he often used it to his advantage in his youth, showing it off to other children in his neighborhood.

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I have. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

What does it say about the intelligence of the researchers that they picked fingers to measure?

It says they read the literature. Index/ring finger ratio is a proxy for testosterone levels in the womb, when the brain is developing.

I would think you would want to look at boys and girls separately for a study like this, and see whether the higher testosterone predicted (say) higher math scores for boys alone and girls alone, as well as for the population as a whole. Then you could argue that it's testosterone affecting the brain development, rather than some other thing related to sex (since testosterone should correlate with practically anything associated with being a boy).

Sort of reminds me of that study that claimed gay men are more likely to have longer index fingers than middle fingers . . . or was it their ring fingers that were supposed to be longer? Though I suppose Jerry Garcia would have confounded the data.

"When they looked at boy's and girl's performance separately, the researchers found a clear link between high prenatal testosterone exposure, as measured by digit ratio, and higher numeracy SAT scores in males.

"They also found a link between low prenatal testosterone exposure, which resulted in a shorter ring finger compared with the index finger, and higher literacy SAT scores for girls."

If that's a complete and accurate report of the results, then it means that index finger length does not predict literacy in boys, and ring finger length does not predict mathematical proficiency in girls.

At the end the house is a partly burned ruin and the two girls are living in it like goddesses in a shrine, with the villagers bringing offerings of food to placate them.

...You never read "The Lottery"? I thought it was, like, a national law that everybody has to read it. Here it is. And here are Jackson's comments on it:

I had written the story three weeks before, on a bright June morning when summer seemed to have come at last, with blue skies and warm sun and no heavenly signs to warn me that my morning's work was anything but just another story. The idea had come to me while I was pushing my daughter up the hill in her stroller - it was, as I say, a warm morning, and the hill was steep, and beside my daughter the stroller held the day's groceries - and perhaps the effort of that last fifty yards up the hill put an edge to the story; at any rate, I had the idea fairly clearly in my mind when I put my daughter in her playpen and the frozen vegetables in the refrigerator, and, writing the story, I found that it went quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause. As a matter of fact, when I read it over later 1 decided that except for one or two minor corrections, it needed no changes, and the story I finally typed up and sent off to my agent the next day was almost word for word the original draft. This, as any writer of stories can tell you, is not a usual thing.

It had simply never occurred to me that these millions and millions of people might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters I was downright scared to open; of the three-hundred-odd letters that I received that summer I can count only thirteen that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends. Even my mother scolded me: "Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker," she wrote sternly, "it does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of Story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?"

Curiously, there are three main themes which dominate the letters of that first summer - three themes which might be identified as bewilderment, speculation, and plain old-fashioned abuse. In the years since then, during which the story has been anthologized, dramatized, televised, and even - in one completely mystifying transformation - made into a ballet, the tenor of letters I receive has changed. I am addressed more politely, as a rule, and the letters largely confine themselves to questions like what does this Story mean? The general tone of the early letters, however, was a kind of wide-eyed, shocked innocence. People at first were not so much concerned with what the story meant; what they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch.

I read a study once that purported to claim that homosexuality could be determined by the middle finger length of known homosexuals as a control group against the middle finger lengths of heterosexual men.

Sorry, Laura. I went back to the library just last night and tried again. Still can't get into it.

Back in high school days I only read "literature" when it was assigned in class, otherwise my reading material was Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and -- since I was transitioning myself from a skinny son of a white collar father regularly beaten up by the sons of the quarry workers in my home town into a muscular athlete -- Robert Howard. Then in college I discovered real mathematics, computers, and bridge.

Sorry, Laura. I went back to the library just last night and tried again. Still can't get into it.

Back in high school days I only read "literature" when it was assigned in class, otherwise my reading material was Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and -- since I was transitioning myself from a skinny son of a white collar father regularly beaten up by the sons of the quarry workers in my home town into a muscular athlete -- Robert Howard. Then in college I discovered real mathematics, computers, and bridge.

@laura, I don't dismiss all books written by and for females. I've read several Georgette Heyer books, and from what I can tell she gets the Regency Period (and preceding periods) right, down to how the people of the upper crust talked and their slang. Regency Buck combines a nice mystery with the Regency Romance theme. I enjoy most of what Janet Evanovich writes, except for the Plums that aren't numbered and centered on holiday themes (e.g., Plum Lucky stinks). I like J.J. Vance.

That made me try some other Romance novels, but all I could think of is that Romance novelists have an exaggerated notion of what a man's stamina is or ought to be.

(Yes, I know J.J. Vance isn't a Romance author, but she is a woman writer and sherrif Brady is entirely female.)

@laura, I followed your second link. I agree with what Feynman wrote about his experience evaluating textbooks for the state of California. The books would have to come up a long way just to be rated "terrible."

Once upon a time the textbook writers could rely on talented female scientists who were stuck with elementary and high school education as their only career path to fill in the gaps, but that hasn't been the case since the late 1970's, very early 1980's at the latest.

My wife is a scientist, BTW, and I know the crap she had to take as a graduate student in the early 1970s. No professor could get away with that stuff today, but this is now and that was then.

I have no sympathy for today's young women. They turn in BS to their professors and make accusations of discrimination when their trash doesn't get an 'A.' No, sweetie-pie, real discrimination is when your professor won't give you time to run your experiments on the cyclotron because "you'd just be taking a job away from some guy who needs to feed his kids." That's what she and her contemporaries went through.

Sorry about the rant. You accidentally opened an old and not well-healed wound, but that's not your fault.